The number of births in China tumbled 10% last year to hit their lowest level on record, a drop that comes despite a slew of government efforts to support parents and amid increasing alarm that the country has become demographically imbalanced.
China had just 9.56 million births in 2022, according to a report published by the National Health Commission. It was the lowest figure since records began in 1949.
The high costs of child care and education, growing unemployment and job insecurity as well as gender discrimination have all helped to deter many young couples from having more than one child or even having children at all.
We were taught about demographic imbalance years ago and how it would be incoming and yet nothing was done.
This is good, in my opinion.
Pollution, overpopulation, health crises, housing crises, food crises, political instability, war, the list goes on for why people aren’t having kids.
The real reason for most of the above boils down to one thing: greed.
A single income family used to be able to support multitude of children without issue. Now a dual income family has to consider finances when considering a single child. All because of the world they’d be bringing it into that has been destroyed by greed.
Contraction of economies is going to hurt all of us, but it’ll hurt the ones at the top the most, because there is only so much they can take until there aren’t enough humans to take from anymore, and the power/wealth gap will have to close out a different system will have to be established.
We’re going to have to figure out how to make economies work with stable or decreasing populations.
I get the basic premise of why growing populations are deemed necessary by economists. It’s simple, I don’t need another lecture from all you proud economy 101 grads.
But it’s simply unsustainable. We have too many damn people on the planet as it is. We need to discourage population growth.
For future generations.
Having continuous population growth leads to continuous economic growth. But…
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You can also achieve that by squeezing more economic productivity out of fewer people, by continuously improving education, diversity of thought, legally protecting creativity, fostering small businesses through seed money and tax incentives, and lots of other stuff.
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We have already been scaling the amount of productivity that comes out of a population since the invention of the steam engine and the factory line. Digital automation, AI and robotics are expected to keep that trend going for a long time.
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Not to mention, that it’s easier now to operate productively in areas of less dense population. Previously small towns would die, but with clever infrastructure that supports broadband everywhere, public transportation, self-driving vehicles, drone delivery, additive manufacturing (3d printing), virtual presence through XR, and so on, you can operate a rural population like a big productive city, and get the benefits of both.
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And at the end of the day, if your economy doesn’t grow, it just means that wealth in the country doesn’t grow.You can maintain that indefinitely. Or if an economy shrinks, society doesn’t come collapsing down until everyone gets poor enough that bribery and corruption overcome lawfulness. But if the society was already wealthy, that will take a long time, and you can mitigate it by doing things like spreading out concentrations of wealth among the population (taxing the rich), increasing immigration, and adopting socioeconomic sustainability planning approaches.
The concept of desiring continuous economic growth needs to die.
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Cool, let’s all have less babies, curb our consumption, and increase efficiencies so the children that are around get to have a future!
the children that are around get to have a future!
I’d love that, but the concern is that society collapses from the sudden top heavy population ratio that we’ve never had to deal with and are unprepared for. The kids won’t have much of a future if that happens
Not necessarily. Also this is already happening in many countries, and they don’t collapse into ruin. They just stagnate for a few generations.
It doesn’t necessarily reduce population density though, because often what happens is that young people leave small towns and villages that have fewer opportunities and move to the big city, causing those little towns to die. That’s usually bad for maintaining cultural and linguistic diversity across a country’s landscape, but good for biodiversity, because as people go, the environment recovers.
Also as population declines, land and resources tend to consolidate more and more into the hands of fewer oligarchs. But the oligarchs all own us already anyway, so NBD.
IIRC one of many covid conspiracy theories is the chinese government intentionally release or allow covid to spread to reduce those older generations given how covid disproportionately kills old people.
Just have to think further out.
How does that relate to society collapsing?
The generation of the future that will live in a less populated world, and perhaps enjoy the lack of density, may be a few generations away
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It’s weird how some people seem to romanticise the idea of society collapsing, or shrug off the potential consequences, when it might be as damaging as any world war.
The generation of the future? Dude, there might not BE any future generations if society collapses the wrong way.
Can you expand on why society would collapse? Like what are the specific problems that would lead to collapse?
I’m not claiming that it will, just that it’s a possibility. As to the how, simple societal unrest caused by economic collapse. If not properly handled, it could be the trigger on a chain reaction.
I’m not romanticizing anything, I never said it would be gumdrops and lollipops.
There would absolutely be problems with a top heavy society, as you mentioned.
My point was that it would be a generation sometime after that one, that can even possibly hope to enjoy a less burdened world.
Or we can fizzle out, it doesn’t fucking matter.
This is a good thing. Almost all countries need to reduce their population. We just have way too many people on the planet and it’s stressing the system.
That’s OK, just don’t mind in working until our deaths since society won’t be able to afford any retirement system, unless for the ultra rich
Are you saying that offspring are most valued as an early retirement?
No, I’m just saying people have to work and if just a small proportion of the population is at work age, then that work age range will inevitable increase. Or do you think just 10%-20% of people working will be be able to support and supply the remaining 80% - 90%?
We can also solve this by throwing old people(when people who today are 20-40 get old probably)to the pit like that dinosaur show from the 90s ;)
Won’t automation/robots/AI help with this? Getting rid of bullshit jobs might also be helpful.
I’m not sure. Every time I think about it, I come to a different conclusion.
For example for the animation industry, today is way faster to create an animation than 100 years ago and there is needed many less people to create a work than in the past, but this didn’t lead to a decrease in the number of people working in the industry, but rather in an massive increase in the output, So if before there were a few pieces of animation created every year, today there are a multitude more, you can see for example the Japanese animation industry the astounding number of new stuff being released every year.What I mean is, in the current system, if you can make more with less, this does not lead to working less, but just in producing more, because companies have to continuously increasing profits forever. The working less won’t come simply in automating more, but the system itself will have to change
Won’t the lack of a work force also give workers better barging power for pay increase and thus the ability to support their elders?
You’re dangerously wrong
https://www.theworldmind.org/home/2021/12/10/the-dangerous-myth-of-overpopulation
https://theecologist.org/2020/apr/16/debunking-overpopulation
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/9/26/16356524/the-population-question
https://socialist.net/capitalism-and-food-hunger-amidst-plenty
Thanks for the links. Interesting reads.
Tldr, oxfam:
Around 50% of these emissions meanwhile can be attributed to the richest 10% of people around the world, who have average carbon footprints 11 times as high as the poorest half of the population.
Hard to swallow pill: The way of life of the rich countries, including the one of their poor citizens, is the problem. We, the westerners, are the problem, not the billions of China and India.
But yay electric cars and recycling… Insert “I’m doing my part” meme.
But if there are massively fewer people (say, 1 billion or less), there are ample safe spaces for them to reside without competition for resources.
Even if they pollute to current standards, the impacts are far reduced because there are far less people to impact.
Inb4 eugenicists: I’m not suggesting people should be removed, killed, or forced to do anything. This discussion suggests humanity simply decides to have far far less members.
This isn’t necessarily about the sheer size of population, and has more to do with birth rates, but this Kurzgesagt video also outlines well the need for a higher birth rate.
I think the problem is not overpopulation but inefficiency with the system
They are both coefficients of the same term in the equation. Resource use per population times total population. Reduce either number and the total burden on the system goes down.
So I was thinking this same thing until I watched a Kurz Gesagt video on YouTube about the effects of unbalanced populations. They pointed out that by the time our population naturally starts decreasing we’ll already be dealing with the worst consequences made worse by an aging population that cares more about maintaining the status quo than the innovation that a younger population would encourage. Grain of salt obviously… But now I’m trying to rethink how I see the issue of maintaining stability for ourselves and descendants while decreasing our strain on the system.
I don’t know where I was going with this.
It’s rather less young people than pensioners…
The system could support more people, but the world leaders are stupid, greedy, and short-sighted so currently it is a bad idea to have more people.
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Almost all countries need to reduce their population.
On the contrary, actually, we need to increase our populations. Assuming that you mean an equal reduction in all demographics, the existence of productive, and hyper-productive people is mostly a game of statistics. A larger population means that more of such people will exist. Such individuals are necessary for pushing humanity forward. A nation with a larger population means a larger natural defence. A larger gloabal population decreases the chances of a mass-extinction event.
it’s stressing the system.
What specific stresses are you referring to? We have no lacking in resources, nor space. Economic activity is proportional to those acting within it.
Hahaha! Humans humaned themselves out of humanity
Not from China but it would have such a massive negative impact on our standard of living that it’s just not worth it. It’s not that we don’t want kids, but we like not being in debt more.
Poverty has never been a major cause of low births. The poorest countries in the world have the highest birth rates. Instead it’s about increasing women’s health and education, giving them the choice to have fewer children or none. Turns out when they have the choice women don’t want to get pregnant and raise kids at 20. They want to have careers and lives and travel and stuff.
Nations need to make child rearing more appealing for couples to want to be parents. Because a huge chunk of people could have salary raises and homes and be upper class and still now want to have kids.
I disagree, it’s about money. Or more accurately perception, the next generation traditionally had it better than the one before until now. The current generation is unable to provide their children a better life than they had so having children is less appealing.
Because a huge chunk of people could have salary raises and homes and be upper class and still now want to have kids.
Or the disappearance of this class has led to lower birth rates.
No, it’s 100% economics. Why do you think that having “careers, lives and travel” (as if having a family is not having a life?) is more appealing to modern first worlders? Because it doesn’t impact their finances severely. Having more children in impoverished countries is a financial gain because children are free labor and lottery tickets to get the entire family out of poverty. In wealthy countries, children are only a financial loss.
It’s good news
Its funny cuz the kids in the pic are on a “slide.”
This is the best summary I could come up with:
BEIJING — The number of births in China tumbled 10% last year to hit their lowest level on record, a drop that comes despite a slew of government efforts to support parents and amid increasing alarm that the country has become demographically imbalanced.
China had just 9.56 million births in 2022, according to a report published by the National Health Commission.
Last year, the country’s population also fell for the first time in six decades, dropping to 1.41 billion people.
That has caused domestic demographers to lament that China will get old before it gets rich, slowing the economy as revenues drop and government debt increases due to soaring health and welfare costs.
Nearly 40% of Chinese newborns last year were the second child of a married couple, while 15% were from families with three or more children, health authorities said.
To spur the country’s flagging birth rate, Beijing has been rolling out a raft of measures, such as efforts to increase child care as well as financial incentives, and President Xi Jinping in May presided over a meeting to study the topic.
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